I always wondered about those "souvenir penny" machines that squish a penny and imprint it with something else.

I don't mind watching the odd commercial, but one per video is too much. Other video sites fall into the same trap.

How about an initial commercial and then 1 per 15 minutes of video content viewed.

What's to stop anyone from creating their own site? Slashcode is free. Meld that with something like digg (except with clueful readers) and the users can control the submissions (since your gripe seems to be with the editors of this site). Sounds easy, but I'll bet it isn't.

My guess is the editors have so many stories to choose from, they've got some keyword filters set up and pick out of that lot. That would explain why there are so many stories along the same lines, which gets kind of repetitive.

Nice tip. You can improve on it like this:

#! /bin/sh
ssh user@hostname -i $0
exit

The $0 (dollar-zero) expands to the name of your script (including path) so you don't need to be in the same directory. Now add $HOME/.ssh to your PATH and you can run it from anywhere.

The nyan was an NPC. You can find this in the world_server.json:

"nyan","28357"

Also:

"rick","33544"

Not sure what the number means yet, but I'm going to find out!

Check out the source code. Sounds like you need to find a "Rick" NPC character to talk to: if(npc.kind === Types.Entities.RICK) {
this.tryUnlockingAchievement("RICKROLLD");
}

If it were another company, I'd say building a subscriber base and selling out to a big company later on. But this is Google - they are the big company. :)

Is jail time just going to drive his hatred deeper? I wonder if forcing him into counselling/education would have been a better avenue.

Fun times, when it took so little to feel like a hacker.

Obligatory printer beatdown ;)

Here's how you fix that: http://trick.ly/

I'm finding distractions are a huge problem for me, too. I didn't realize I was so sensitive to distractions until recently. It seems to take me about an hour to really get in the zone on a problem, and having to multitask something running in the background kills that deep thought process. I wonder how common that is or if there are tips to overcome it...

That's fine if you're working alone. In a team environment, waiting for someone to roll in "when they feel like it" so you can ask them a question is a real pisser. I'm not a fan of clock watching by any means, but we eventually agreed to a common set of hours that everyone was expected to be in at (like 11:00am-3:00pm) and I thought that worked pretty well for most people.

This is my personal data and it is starting to become unbelievably unruly to deal with as far as data integrity and security are concerned.

Keep all your important files in a version control system. Personally, I use Perforce (it's free for 2 users or less). That gives you: multi-revision history and checkin comments, an easy way to pull a subset of files to any computer in your house, and peace of mind that you don't need to worry about kids deleting anything important as it's all stored on the server with history. Also easy to see what has changed on any computer and check those files in. And there's a big win for data integrity checks: Perforce stores the checksum of all files (and revisions) and can easily check that every file still matches the checksum in the central database. If you have any disk corruption, you'll know about it when you run 'p4 verify -q //...'. You can store files of several gigabytes each with no problem.

On top of this, I use rsync to copy the server data onto backup drives. I'm also looking at storing backups online, but haven't taken that step yet.

I've been using this system for years and I couldn't imagine being without it. It's so easy to find and retrieve exactly what I want - my resume 5 revisions ago, my tax return, photos from 2003. Even without that, the data integrity checks give a lot of peace of mind.

And warning people about safe things just desensitizes them to warnings about things that actually *can be* dangerous. When that happens, more harm is done than good.